Frohnmayer Rejects Grant for Boston Show

Special to The New York Times

Published: October 23, 1990

BOSTON, Oct. 22—
Officials of the Institute of Contemporary Art here said today that they had received formal notification of the rejection by the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, John E. Frohnmayer, for a $40,000 grant for an exhibition of the artworks of Mike Kelley.

The money was to help with the organization and tour of the exhibition, which was to begin in Boston in 1992, and the grant had been recommended by an endowment selection panel.

The head of the institute, David A. Ross, said today that political considerations were the reason Mr. Frohnmayer rejected the grant.

Museum officials said that while Mr. Frohnmayer has gone against a panel's advice in rejecting grants for exhibitions under the endowment's visual arts program, it was the first time for such an action in the category of special museum exhibitions. In June, the endowment rejected grants to four solo performance artists whose work includes strong sexual content.

"This portentous act on the part of the endowment's chairman appears to be motivated purely by what we consider to be political considerations completely inappropriate for the endowment's mission," Mr. Ross said in a statement. The museum had originally requested a grant of $60,000. Obscenity Is Denied

Mr. Ross, whose museum was the last stop for the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition this fall, said Mr. Kelley, a multi-media artist, explores difficult social issues but is not obscene. Some of the artist's works, he said, "deal with the pathology of our times, some deal with the body and references to sexuality and sociology" and others with "madness and particular forms of schizophrenic behavior."

Mr. Kelley's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said Rosamund Felsen, Mr. Kelley's agent in Los Angeles.

His work is on display in an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts entitled "Figuring the Body." It made a previous stop in 1988 at the institutes's "Binational: Art of the Late 80's" show and in "L.A. Hot and Cold" at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee moved to continue content restrictions on the endowment by voting to reinstate an anti- obscenity pledge that artists and institutions must sign before receiving grant money. Mr. Ross said the institute had not signed the pledge, which is in the current law, because the grant application was submitted last spring. The Council's Opinion

Endowment officials denied political motivations, however, saying that the institute's grant request was rejected on recommendation of the 26-member National Council on the Arts, which reviewed Mr. Kelley's work and the peer review panel's decision in May.

"It's not unheard of for a grant to be rejected at any stage in the review process," said an endowment spokeswoman, Virginia E. Falck. "It was an administrative oversight that a rejection letter had not gone out until now."

A statement from the endowment said the agency would not "discuss the details of any of the 14,000 grants rejected each year other than with officials of the applying organization."